Lincoln in the World (33 page)

Lincoln, meanwhile, wrote public letters appealing to the sympathies of workers. “I have understood well,” he told laborers in Manchester, “that the duty of self-preservation rests solely with the American people. But I have at the same time been aware that favor or disfavor of foreign nations might have a material influence
in enlarging and prolonging the struggle with disloyal men in which the country is engaged. A fair examination of history has seemed to authorize a belief that the past action and influences of the United States were generally regarded as having been beneficent toward mankind. I have therefore reckoned upon the forbearance of nations. Circumstances … induced me especially to expect that if justice and good faith should be practiced by the United States, they would encounter no hostile influence on the part of Great Britain.” Lincoln told the demonstrators that his hopes now appeared to be well placed, and thanked the workers for their “sublime Christian heroism.” The meetings, he declared, provided “an energetic and reinspiring assurance of the inherent power of truth and of the ultimate and universal triumph of justice, humanity, and freedom.”
¹⁰⁹

Seward continued to privately resent the proclamation. At an intimate dinner with the president’s old friend Orville Browning in late January, the secretary of state complained (as Browning later told his diary) that he “regretted the policy of the administration—thought the proclamations were unfortunate, and that we would have been nearer the end of the war and the end of slavery both without them.” Still, Seward sighed that the decision was “now past, and we must look to the future.” At least relations with the European powers seemed to be improving. The secretary of state recalled that “it was not alone the abolition clamor at home that induced the president to issue [the Emancipation Proclamation], but that he was farther influenced by the wishes of foreign nations who could not be made to understand our condition.” Seward acknowledged that “there was no prospect of foreign interference now—that France and England were jealous of each other and neither had any intention of interfering with us.”
¹¹⁰

On March 26, 1863, British workers organized their most ambitious meeting yet, at St. James’s Hall in London. Marx was among the spectators in the throbbing, cheering crowd. Some historians have speculated that the communist actually helped to put together the event. Henry Adams, who also attended and sent a report home
to Washington about the meeting, later recalled that he had assumed Marx had taken the lead. Modern scholars are less certain about what role—if any—Marx played in organizing the gathering. We do know, however, that the emotional demonstration impressed the ornery philosopher. “The workers,” Marx reported to Engels two weeks later, “spoke
excellently
.” The following year Marx lauded the St. James’s Hall demonstrators as the “labor kings of London.” The meeting, Marx maintained to a friend, “prevented Palmerston from declaring war upon the United States.”
¹¹¹

Marx’s analysis was far too simplistic. Palmerston could be combative and at times seemed to favor the dissolution of the United States, yet the British prime minister actually acted as a realistic check on more interventionist members of his cabinet. At first, the news of the Emancipation Proclamation seemed to push Palmerston closer to the interventionist position. Eventually, however, worries about proliferating crises closer to home kept him from reaching out. The popular enthusiasm unleashed by the Emancipation Proclamation further cemented the British prime minister’s resolve to refrain from intervention.
¹¹²
Lincoln’s men in London gleefully took note of the shift in opinions. “The Emancipation Proclamation,” Henry Adams wrote home to his brother, “has done more for us here than all our former victories and all our diplomacy. It is creating an almost convulsive reaction in our favor.”
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Marx discovered that the War Between the States had dramatically reinvigorated European workers—a goal that he had been trying to accomplish for two decades. “It would, indeed, be difficult to over-estimate the importance of the Civil War for the subsequent history of the British Labour movement,” writes Royden Harrison, a leading scholar of socialism. “Even more than the Polish and Italian national movements, the Civil War helped to widen the horizons of the British workers, and prepared their leaders for participation in [international organizations of workingmen].”
¹¹⁴

In Britain’s industrial districts, laborers were becoming politically active out of necessity. When newspapers were delivered, workers
would read the dispatches out loud, attracting a crowd. City employees posted the latest issues on the walls of railroad stations and public buildings. Almost every edition contained details of the American conflict. With mills shuttered, out-of-work laborers attended special schools and learned to read. The rise in literacy helped to fuel political awareness and demands for change. Still, political leaders found the new readers of Britain’s textile districts difficult to propagandize. Nineteenth-century newspapers, modern scholars emphasize, mirrored public attitudes as much as they guided them.
¹¹⁵

In the case of the
Bee-Hive
, public attitudes seem to have actually played a role in ousting the paper’s pro-Confederate editor. In January, as the public pressure was intensifying, the
Bee-Hive
’s editorial board fired its chief. The paper quickly swung its support behind Lincoln and the North. It attacked Britain’s ruling class, which it derided as “a few effete aristocrats who love their moneybags more than their fellow men.” The paper reserved an entire page for the massive meeting in St. James’s Hall. Lincoln was portrayed as a hero to the workers, many of whom considered themselves “wage slaves.” Marx worked feverishly to gain control of the paper for his increasingly active international organization of workers. “It is impossible,” he later wrote Engels, “to have a movement here without a press organ.”
¹¹⁶

Marx and the political program he supported were gaining ground. He had always insisted that it was imperative that the working classes “master themselves the mysteries of international politics” if they were to succeed. Now Marx began to put his theories into action. Marshaling the workers was exhausting. The philosopher spent days at mass meetings, late nights at committee meetings, and hours signing new membership cards in London pubs. Marx told Engels that he was overwhelmed. His organizing work “haunts me like a nightmare,” he complained. His health continued to fail. Uncomfortable boils spread across his body, as they did almost every winter. Marx complained to Engels that he had grown a “second Frankenstein on my back.” Marx sometimes took “medicines,” including opium, arsenic, and Spanish fly in an attempt to cure the sores.
¹¹⁷

Marx, meanwhile, was beginning to gain a greater respect for Lincoln. But his support had never been a sentimental thing. The philosopher’s careful analysis of economic and demographic trends told him that the Federal government was sure to overwhelm the Confederacy eventually. Although Marx supported the “bourgeois republic” in the short run, he believed a Union victory would ultimately bring about the system’s demise. “Most observers who spoke of the promise of America,” notes the scholar Laurence Moore, “found that promise in America’s difference from Europe. Marx and Engels turned this vision on its head. America could become a promised land to the extent that it became just like Europe—and multiplied its vices.” Marx’s old boss Horace Greeley had once complained about “the unprincipled egotism that is the soul of European diplomacy.” Marx, on the other hand, believed that America—like all capitalist countries—was also drowning in “the icy water of egotistical calculation.”
¹¹⁸

Lincoln believed strongly that human beings, whether American or European, tend to act in their own self-interest. Yet that worldview—and, in fact, his entire approach to foreign affairs—took on dramatic new dimensions with his decision to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. Until now, Lincoln had maintained that “reason, cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason” should be the principle that guides policy, including global affairs. During the Mexican War, he had coolly worked to avoid upsetting the sectional balance. In the first days of the current conflict, Lincoln had calmly reined in his hot-tempered secretary of state. After the seizure of the
Trent
, the president had tamped down passions and ultimately made a deeply unsatisfying—but also eminently reasonable—decision to release the captives.
¹¹⁹

Yet with the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln reimagined his core principle—an innovation that the new world of the mid-nineteenth century demanded. The decree still represented a calculation of national interest. Lincoln hoped that freeing slaves in the Confederate states would both preserve the Union at home and
win sympathies abroad. The decision, he later explained, was “not a question of sentiment or taste, but one of physical force which may be measured and estimated as horse-power and Steam-power are measured and estimated.” Lincoln, to be sure, had long opposed slavery. Yet he had also believed that the Constitution protected the institution. Now, however, the president merged his old attempt to preserve the Union with the new tool of the Emancipation Proclamation. The synthesis, he argued, would help to defeat the Confederacy while fundamentally improving the Union in the process.
¹²⁰

Crafting—and ultimately selling—that policy required a creative genius who could marshal all the tools of his age to convince his countrymen of its merits. The proclamation’s efficacy as an instrument of foreign relations is still contested by historians. There is, however, no debating that the measure marked a major step forward in the evolution of presidential power. “The effectiveness of the President’s personal propaganda warfare could not be measured,” writes historian David Donald, “for it was not so much public statements or popular rallies as the internal dynamics of British and French politics, plus fears of ultimate American reprisal, that determined a course of neutrality for the two major European powers. But for Lincoln the opportunity to use the White House as a pulpit, to speak out over the dissonant voices of foreign leaders to the common people, daringly broadened the powers of the Presidency.”
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Yet even as Lincoln expanded executive influence, the office was taking its toll on the man. In February 1863, as the monster meetings in Britain intensified, a White House staff member found Lincoln looking “worn and haggard.” The president’s hands trembled as he attempted to write a letter. Lincoln, the staffer observed, was “growing feeble.” The president would need his strength in the months to come. The Emancipation Proclamation may have ended the threat of British intervention. But it did not end Lincoln’s foreign-affairs troubles. The proclamation may have actually emboldened France’s emperor, Napoleon III, to challenge Lincoln’s government for control of North America.
¹²²

Marx considered the French emperor “clumsily cunning, knavishly naïve, doltishly sublime, a calculated superstition, a pathetic burlesque, a cleverly stupid anachronism, a world-historic piece of buffoonery and an undecipherable hieroglyphic.” In the realm of foreign affairs, however, Napoleon III could also be a dangerous man. The French emperor, Marx told readers of the
New York Tribune
, was “a reckless gambler, a desperate adventurer, who would as soon dice with royal bones as any other if the game promised to leave him a winner.” As the war ground on, France’s gambling emperor prepared to bet against Abraham Lincoln.
¹²³

Lincoln believed that defining America’s place in the world was at the core of the Union’s mission. The “central idea” of the Northern effort, he explained, was to prove “that popular government is not an absurdity.”

As an ambitious young politician in Springfield, Lincoln cultivated the support of the powerful Edwards family, which held weekly salons where guests were greeted in French.